One or other of the candidates needed to break the 50-percent threshold to avoid Turkey going to its first election runoff in the post-Ottoman republic's 100-year history on May 28.
Turkish law bans the reporting of any results until 9 p.m. By late on Sunday there could be a good indication of whether there will be a runoff. "I see these elections as a choice between democracy and dictatorship," said Ahmet Kalkan, 64, as he voted in Istanbul for Kilicdaroglu, echoing critics who fear Erdogan will govern ever more autocratically if he wins.
Turks voted on Sunday in one of the most important elections in modern Türkiye’s 100-year history, which could either unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and halt his government's increasingly authoritarian path or usher in a third decade of his rule. The vote will decide not only who leads Türkiye, a NATO-member country of 85 million, but also how it is governed, where its economy is headed amid a deep cost of living crisis, and the shape of its foreign policy.